When President Barack Obama met with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu over coffee and sweets in his private presidential dining room off the Oval Office last week, a solemn Civil War-era painting featuring Abraham Lincoln deliberating with his generals hung above their evening tete-a-tete, as seen in an official photograph of the meeting the White House later released.

The late 1860s painting, “The Peacemakers,” by George P.A. Healy, shows Lincoln, his chin resting thoughtfully on his fist, conferring with his Generals William Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral David Porter aboard the River Queen, the steamer that took the president from Washington up the Potomac to the Union base at City Point, Virginia. In the two weeks that followed the March 27th 1865 meeting recounted in the painting, the South’s General Lee agreed to terms of surrender, and Lincoln, after thanking God that he had lived to see the end of the four-year civil war, was assassinated.

Acquired by the Truman White House, “The Peacemakers” was displayed in the White House Treaty Room from the Kennedy through the George W. Bush presidencies. At some time during the Obama administration it moved to the private presidential dining room. The question for Mideast watchers is, when?

A photo taken in the early days of the new administration of Obama’s weekly lunch there with Vice President Joseph Biden shows hanging where Lincoln and his war panel is now the same portrait of George Washington seen in a photo of a 2007 lunch between George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney.

At an April 21 meeting over tea between Obama and Jordan’s King Abdullah, just as the new administration was launching its optimistic Middle East peace push, Washington had been replaced by a wholly more pastoral landscape. And by the meeting with Netanyahu earlier this month, that in turn had been replaced by "the Peacemakers.'

Could the White House be trying to send a subliminal message to Netanyahu – or perhaps to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose threat to quit last week was the major subject of discussion at the Obama-Netanyahu meeting?

The White House didn’t respond to a query about the painting switch. But an official White House photo of Obama meeting with House speaker Nancy Pelosi on October 22 also shows the Peacemakers hanging there.

“Obama wants a two-state solution, and he knows if it doesn't happen in four to eight years, he'll be the president – the Nobel-winner no less – on whose watch it will expire,” said veteran U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller. “Fighting with Israel makes no sense now; there'll be plenty of time for that later; and who knows, maybe Bibi – who holds many cards – will want to join the peacemakers.” 

Above, Obama and Jordan’s King Abdullah in the private presidential dining room on April 21, beneath a pastoral landscape. 

Below, Obama and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the same seats earlier this month, beneath "the Peacemakers."